This year seems to be about the do it yourself game. It started last
Xmas with
Drawn To Life for the Nintendo DS
,a pretty fun game for 5 year olds where you get to draw your own hero and number of
elements of the 2d side scroller. It’s actually pretty decent and if your 5 year old (nod nod wink wink)
likes SpongeBob you can get this Xmas edition,
Drawn to Life: Spongebob Squarepants
which is basically the same thing but you get to draw Mr SquarePants.

The big thing this Xmas is
Little Big Planet
which I never actually played but from the reviews seems like a pretty souped up
Drawn To Life.
For starters you move from a DS to a PS3 which means about a gazillion more eye candy. And then
Little Big Planet
seems to not be designed for 5 year olds.

And then, you have the grandaddy of all DIY games, Spore. You get 3 flavours,
Spore
which comes with a assload of crappy DRM for the PC that will make the game not run and screw your
system for ever, or you can with the graphic card issues on the Mac version. Then you have something called
Spore Creature Creator
which I don’t understand and the DS version,
Spore Creatures
which is a diferent game aparently and gets boring afer about 5 minutes. So adding together the craptastic DRM,
the lack of polishing and the overall pointlessness, Spore is the big failure of the DIY game year.

I had Star Wars: The Force Unleashed for the Wii on preorder since forever so when it arrived my first reaction was “oh c* i forgot to cancel this”. This game isn’t getting very favourable reviews on the other consoles so I was a bit uneasy about it. But I broke the wrapper and sloted it into the Wii anyway.

First of all, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is not a family game. It’s rated 16+ and despite there not being a lot of gore there’s quite spectacular violence and mayem. Also, if you’re a pure Jedi this isn’t the game for you. You play out the Dark Side and get to exercise a lot of your evil powers.
There was a lot of talk about the potential of this game on the Wii with the lightsabers and force gestures and so on. It’s not quite exactly what people dreamed about but it’s pretty close. It’s not pitch perfect but if you swash from left to right your character will do a left to right cut and so on. The only issue so far is there’s too many combos and it gets confusing to to a point.

In terms of story line, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed for the Wii is pretty much what you expect from the Star Wars, the bad guys are Evil, have dark plots and backstab each other. The good bit about playing the Dark Side is don’t need to be very careful about who you kill. A lot of the time you’re just killing everybody just like a fliped out ninja.